Building Blog Readership by Monitoring What Other Bloggers are Writing

Today I want to share a technique that I used when I started my first money making blog to find new readers. It’s one of those tips that probably won’t bring you thousands of new visitors to your blog all at once – but it definitely did help me to grow traffic levels in the early days.

Before I share the tip – let me start with a short illustrative tangent

Regular readers will know that we recently put our house on the market (and sold it). One week after we first began the marketing campaign to sell our house (we advertised in newspapers and online) we began to find that our mail box was filled with letters from a variety of companies including moving services, mortgage brokers and house cleaning services.

Obviously these companies were watching who was advertising in different real estate websites and newspapers and gathering the addresses of advertised properties to send their own marketing material to. In this way they were targeting prospects who were more than likely to be in need of those types of services.

While I found these letters somewhat annoying – they actually did work. We booked a window cleaner through one of them and my wife’s collected all of the removalist companies for when we move home in December.

What does this have to do with promoting a blog?

While checking our mail box this morning and finding another moving company letter I was reminded of something that I used to do when I was starting up one of my early blogs.

The blog was on digital cameras and photography and as most new bloggers do – I was struggling to find readers for it.

One day when I was pondering my lack of readership I went to Technorati and typed the words ‘digital camera’ into the search field there. I was actually looking to see if there were any new cameras being released – but what I found instead were 15 or so blog posts written mainly by personal bloggers talking about different aspects of their use of cameras.

One was complaining about his camera being a piece of junk, another was boasting about her new camera, another was asking for advice on which camera they should buy, another wanted to know how to use their camera better…. etc

I spent half an hour that day leaving helpful and relevant comments on each of those blogs – making suggestions for new cameras, giving tips on how to use them etc. In each case I left the URL of my camera blog in the URL field so that they could find my blog – and in a couple of the posts I even left links in the comments pointing to useful pages on my blog to help the blogger find more information.

What I found was that around half of those that I left these comments for responded to me either with follow up comments or emails. In each case they said they’d check out my blog. Not only did they do this – but I found that many that I helped with comments actually linked up to my blog in days and weeks following me making contact.

As a blogger with just a handful of regular readers I decided that this technique could be quite powerful and I began to monitor a variety of keywords on Technorati with the goal of interacting with other bloggers when they brought up a topic that I was writing about.

Tools for Monitoring Keywords that Bloggers Use

These days there are a variety of tools that you can use to help you to monitor keywords that other bloggers are using in their posts. these include:

Technorati Watchlists – you can use these to monitor keywords and/or URLs. You can set them up to report any blog that uses those words.

Google Blog Search Blog Alerts – in the same way Google’s Blog Search allows you to track keywords and have them emailed to you either as it happens, daily or weekly.

There are other tools available for this type of monitoring – but I find between these two that you are pretty comprehensive. Feel free to suggest any of your favorite monitoring tools that you use.

Be Useful and Generous

The key with this technique is to not only find when people are talking about topics that relate to your blogs – but to respond to what they’re saying in a genuine and helpful way. Don’t spam their comments with your links but answer questions, make suggestions, share your experience etc. The more useful and generous your comment is the more likely you are to have someone check out who you are and what else you might have to say that is useful.

Building Your Blog One Reader at a Time

I’ve shared this technique with a number of people and around 50% of the time that I have done so I’ve had people write it off as all too hard and not worthwhile. Some bloggers are only interested in building traffic to their blog quickly and any technique that doesn’t have the potential to bring in hundreds and thousands of new readers is ignored.

My own experience is that techniques like this one that build your blog’s readership one reader at a time can be very worthwhile. One new reader who comes back on a daily basis over a number of years because they’ve been genuinely helped by you can have a significant impact upon your blog not only in terms of their own visits and comments – but when they’re a blogger the potential for them to bring their readership with them can be significant.

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Darren, this is exactly what is integral to building traffic. Gaining readers shouldn’t be a quest to make money, but rather a quest to provide useful and relevant information / services that benefit that person.

My father owns his own carpet cleaning company, and he took a very grassroots approach to building relationships in the early stages of his company, and as a result the “word-of-mouth” advertising led him to become one of the top 3 cleaners for my metropolitan area.

The reason this is such a great post is because of it’s simplicity, yet effectiveness. Thanks a bunch!

I used to that using technorati. When you want to write about some theme (this trick is useful when writing about news) you may search what others already said about that subject, and maybe even link them if they provide any useful information about the subject. You’ll get at least one more visit and maybe even one more reader (the owner of the blog you linked to)

Additionally, if I find the same content I want to link in two blogs I will link the less authoritative one. It will convert in a reader more easily ;)

Sometimes you can do something like: Look who’s talking about this: and then link to 4 or 5 other blogs

This is a very good idea, Darren. It is one of those “why didn’t I think of that?!” simple but missed ideas that really could help. I agree with making sure that the comments are legit and helpful and not just spam.

When you put up an ebook its an excellent way of getting your name/site out there. Its all about using all your resources and making sure your external content is high in quality. Sometimes the smallest things make a difference in the long run.

Going hand-in-hand with that, you can use Google to discover what topics are hot at the moment and go to the sites that already hit on those topics or make a new post of your own with your own point of view or spin on it.

For example, being a big Star Trek fan, I instantly caught on to the new movie going into production and got in on the 2 day wave of people looking for the Heroes star who will be playing Spock.

There is another tool that WordPress has now, called Tag Surfer…it’s on the Dashboard part of the main WordPress.com site…anyways, while is only covers WordPress blogs, it’s a nice way to look up blogs by tags you want to watch.

Liking the tip. Won’t be as effective for me as my blog is so random. People need to realise that there is no shortcut to developing loyal readership, and that fast traffic will disappear as fast as it came.

Hi Darren! I’ve been doing this over the past few months and you’re right, it really does work! I’m not getting thousands of hits to my blog, but I have noticed a sharp upswing in my average daily hits.

The key, as you pointed out, is to make thoughtful, useful comments and not to spam someone else’s blog. I only comment when I have something to add to the discussion – thus I’m very selective on what posts I comment on on the blogs I read.

This reminded me: When I was using Craigslist to find subletters for an empty room we had, besides the potential subletters responding, I also got many responses that are advertisements for housing / roommate matching service websites. Although I found that a little annoying, there’s no doubt that they are targetting the right people.

I have been highly impressed by your advice, I decided to get serious about blogging only this week and your posts are helping me get off on the right foot. I can definitely understand what you’re saying, I’m sure your success is mainly in part because of the large amount of people that you have helped. I know I am one of those people so thanks and keep up the good work!

I’ve been using google alerts both for news related to keywords and for blogs for a while now. I always get a rush when my posts show up at the top in the blog alerts. :D
Be careful when you set up your keywords, though. I’ve had to revise mine several times by disallowing certain words, or else you get a lot of irrelevant noise. You wouldn’t think something like “lighthouse” would have to be modified, but do you know how many foundations, churches, software, music, companies, buildings, etc. there are out there using that word?
I’ll have to try the Technorati one, that looks useful. Great post as always, Darren. I think you personally are raising the level of blogs out there, just by all the practical advice you’re giving here.

I would like to add to your list another element we shouldn’t forget: building reputation. This goes hand in hand with “building your blog one reader at the time.” The more you focus on each of your readers the more you have to win: trust, respect and build rapport. A very effective technique in the Web 2.0 world. :)

I think this is also how you build reputation: by focusing on each reader you answer to their needs, you show that you really care about what they think and want from you. If they are happy, they will certainly spread the word…

Great post. I have recently opened my own blog and have been using this technique. I combined it with related blogs and forums that allow signatures at the end of your posts.

Forums seem to be the best place for this, at least for niche topics, like my comic book blog. You can typically make a small 500×100 pixel banner and place in your signature that links directly to your blog. As long as you post relevant and informative replies and do not just spam your site nonstop, you can build up a decent amount of new readers.

Also, if you wrote a particular article that relates to a topic posted, you can leave a summary of your article and a link to the actual post telling people that if they were interested in a longer, more detailed version to check the link.

Either way, great article. The personal approach is the best way to new readers as it builds a relationship with each new person you help and that is what makes for longterm readership, which is what you want early on.

Here’s an extra tip for your readers as well:
I started a new blog recently and have seen a sharp increase of readership and subscription as soon as I offered free stuff (software or ebooks). It benefits the readers and grows my own list at the same time.

I totally resonate with this post. Actually, among many tips you have provided in increasing traffic, this feels the best fit for me to implement.

How much % of Problogger readers are loyal, and how much % of readers are new? Among loyal readers, are they mostly people who come back to your site at least once a week (like myself)? How did that portfolio change over time? If you have a chance to share that with us, in the future….

Another benefit to this tip, for me, is that I’m expecting to grow as a writer, webmaster, etc. as a result of the daily blogging I’m doing now while I don’t have very many readers. I still spend 45 minutes struggling with WordPress about every other time I make a post. (poor me, right?)

But I couldn’t grow without those readers I do have. I think it’s just the right time for having a small readership. I have no idea how long the learning curve will be, but it doesn’t help me learn to think about that.

Really great post Darren. One truth about increasing traffic to your site at the beginning phase of it is that it is a slow process, specially if you want to build a loyal readership and aren’t looking for one-time visits. And this post reinforeces that belief for me. Thanks Darren.

A Taylor mentioned something interesting above. Are you planning to write a book on blogging, Darren? From where I see, if there is anyone qualified to do so, it is you. I would personally really love to see a book from you.

This was quite an informative post. I have had a blog, updated sporadically now for about a year. The thing is, following advice in another blog traffic article, it suggested turning comments off to avoid readers seeing that your blog has no comments on every post. This is something I did, but it has just occurred to me that I have no readers anyway – so what does it matter? I might just turn comments back on now!

Thank you SO much for this! After spending hours reading the same old advice (usually good advice, but things I am already doing), to find fresh pointers that are new to me is great. I have underestimated other bloggers – focusing too much on readers. Bloggers are readers too! heh.

Hi Darren – thank you so much for sharing these tips here. I will begin today implementing them. I do use Google Alerts, but I think I must be using them incorrectly. I’ll go look at that again, and I’ll also give Technorati a try as well.